In The Future Don't Make This Mistake

In the Future Don’t Make This Mistake
March 16, 2010

I always meditate on the reasons that students utter or write what they do in Russian. Why do they so stubbornly take so long, it seems to me, to learn what is so clear to me as the blue sky on a cloudless day. But there ‘s the rub — it seems to me because I know it as second nature, without questioning whether it makes sense, is counterintuitive, or maybe just a gratuitous solution to a problem in the language that might have been solved a dozen other ways.

Take, for example, my pious insistence that the imperfective infinitive, and it alone, is associated with phasals like начну, кончу and, of course the analytic ‘future tense’ formed by буду. No perfectives allowed. Further, the conjugated form of a perfective verb has a ‘future’ meaning. No if’s, and’s, or but’s — and I am sensitive to such linguistic metaphors. I do know in the back of my mind, of course, that there are lots of ‘exceptions’ to the perfective present = future tense, one of which I will mention here: the modal use of the P future.

Ask someone the time, and she has no watch. “Не скажу,” she says, meaning ‘I can’t tell you’, not ‘I will not tell you.’

The future tense itself is a variety of willed or predicted potentiality which has not occurred. The past can find witnesses and testimony, it may be narrated and celebrated and regretted and analyzed. The present, Nabokov said, is a luminous moving point at the crest of the vastness of the past. The future is a modal predication, a potentiality, a path not yet taken.

In Latin we learned amo, amas, amat, “I love, and so on,” amabo, amabis, amabit, “I will love, and so on,” amabam, amabas, amabat “I used to love, and so on,” as though they share equal and equivalent places in the synopses.

I blithely keep saying спрошу means ‘I will ask’, while буду спрашивать, also future, means ‘I will be asking, will ask repeatedly.’ How far from the truth this might have been, but for a different historical development! In the twelve and thirtreenth centuries Russian had a very different system, though we really aren’t sure, beyond textual examples, how it really worked.

But listen to this: it appears that, for some writers, or speakers, any modal verb: хотэти ‘want, wish’, имати ‘have to, possess’, начати ‘begin’, быти ‘be’ may be used with the infinitive of either aspect, to make a kind of future, but a kind that probably differentiated carefully among the modals. I repeat: with an infinitive of either aspect, not merely imperfective. Further news for the Delphic oracle: the present tense itself, in some usages, seems to mean future — the present tense of either aspect.
This sounds like our students’ delight: use any modal, any aspect, and, as with Humpty Dumpty, it means future, if I want it to mean future.

(By the way, as an aside: I find the verb хотэти with the first plural хочем, just like our students: хочу, хочешь, хочет, хочем, хочете, хочут. Why on earth didn’t it stay that way?)

The forms of буду аre often used in conditionals with the modal meaning ‘if it should happen, if it turns out’.

More later,
gmc